Lynette Wardle, principal harpist of the Richmond Symphony and Albany (NY) Symphony (some commute!), sprang one of those rare but always welcome “where have you have been all my life?” compositions on a near-capacity audience in the season finale of the Metro Collection series.

Alberto Ginastera, Argentina’s preeminent composer (of music other than tango, anyway), drew on his country’s indigenous music but generally filtered those strains through a rather hard-edged neoclassical style. That tone of voice informs his Harp Concerto, but so does an infectious urban energy, a full and richly varied palette of impressionistic color, and, in the concerto’s central movement, an almost romantic lyricism.

Ginastera lets the harp do what harps do best – plenty of glissandos and rarified crystalline tones – but he also makes the instrument highly percussive and has it impersonate a guitar. The solo harp at times floats above a colorful and busily rhythmic orchestration; at other times, the instrument weaves through the orchestra.

Wardle masterfully negotiated the score’s many technical challenges and the harp’s shifts of tone and mood. Conductor Steven Smith led alert and animated orchestral accompaniment.

With the exception of the opening selection, the Overture to Rossini’s “The Italian Girl in Algiers,” the program was devoted to Spanish-accented music. The Ginastera concerto was followed by the Suite No. 1 from Manuel de Falla’s “The Three-Cornered Hat” and the Symphony in D major of Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, a short-lived Basque composer of the early 19th century.

The Falla suite, from a ballet score introduced in 1919 for a Serge Diaghilev production with scenic design by Pablo Picasso and choreography by Léonide Massine, is a brightly colored, cheerful romp, centered on a fandango. Smith and the orchestra played up its extroversion and comic touches. Bassoonist Tom Schneider played his role as lead comic voice broadly.

Arriaga’s symphony, written in Paris shortly before the composer’s death (probably of tuberculosis) a few days shy of his 20th birthday, is a mature and polished composition – not up to the standards of Beethoven or Schubert, to be sure, but better than most symphonies being produced at the time outside of Vienna. Arriaga’s craftsmanship is evident throughout, notably in the way he exploits tension between major and minor passages to give his music a dramatic edge and to keep things moving.

Smith and the orchestra delivered a warmly voiced and, where appropriate, urgently expressive account of this obscure but rewarding work.

The esteemed American pianist Richard Goode has spent much of his career serving as a mentor to young musicians, notably in 14 years (1999-2013) as co-artistic director, with Mitsuko Uchida, of Marlboro, the music school and festival in Vermont. More recently, Goode has been performing chamber concerts and recitals with young colleagues.

In the last of this season’s Rennolds Chamber Concerts at Virginia Commonwealth University, Goode performed with the young soprano Sarah Shafer, accompanying her in art-songs by Brahms, Fauré and Debussy, interspersed with his performances of solo-piano works by those composers.

Shafer, whose operatic career is blossoming rapidly, boasts a rich, robust voice whose maturity belies her age. She brings a palpable sense of drama to her performances. These qualities enhanced some of the repertory she chose for this program – Brahms’ “Auf dem Kirchhofe” (“In the Churchyard”), for example, and in a contrasting vein, “Ariettes oubliées,” Debussy’s settings of six poems of Paul Verlaine.

In more intimate or conversational pieces, however, Shafer’s delivery was simply too theatrical. Toning down to the scale of art-song doesn’t come naturally to many opera singers; they tend to inflate or “oversell” songs. There was a good deal of this is Shafer’s performance – but also evidence, in two pieces by Fauré, “Les Berceaux” (“The Cradles”) and “Après un Rêve” (“After a Dream”), that she grasped the distinction between art-song and operatic aria.

Goode has long been recognized as a master of Austro-German classical and romantic repertory, and his treatments of three numbers from Brahms’ Op. 76 set, the capriccios in F sharp minor and B minor and Intermezzo in A flat major, lived up to that high repute.

His performance of Fauré’s Nocturne in D flat major, Op. 63, emphasized the composer’s romanticism over his proto-impressionism – Goode made the piece sound almost like Gallic Schumann. In three of Debussy’s piano preludes, Goode’s showed gratifying sensitivity to subtleties of color and articulation, but also a touch of rhythmic brittleness.

Classical performances in and around Richmond, with selected events elsewhere in Virginia and the Washington area. Program information, provided by presenters, is updated as details become available. Adult single-ticket prices are listed; senior, student/youth, group and other discounts may be offered.

* In and around Richmond: A busy and varied coda to the fall-to-spring concert season: Pianist Richard Goode is joined by soprano Sarah Shafer in the season finale of the Rennolds Chamber Concerts, May 2 at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Singleton Arts Center. . . . The Richmond Symphony stages a “Music Marathon” benefit featuring its members, staff and associates on May 2 at Hardywood Park Craft Brewery; the finale of its Metro Collection series, featuring Lynette Wardle playing Ginastera’s Harp Concerto, May 3 at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland; and the Richmond Symphony Chorus singing in Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms” and the orchestra performing Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony in the Masterworks series finale, May 9-10 at Richmond CenterStage. . . . The Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia presents harpsichordist Carsten Schmidt playing Book 1 of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” on May 3 at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Comforter, and an ensemble of flute, piano and strings samples Scandinavian and Russian music in a free concert on May 16 at the Richmond Public Library and ticketed concerts on May 17 and 19 at First Unitarian Universalist Church. . . . Wesley Parrott performs in the last program of the season’s Repertoire Recital Series of the Richmond chapter, American Guild of Organists, May 8 on the Taylor & Boody organ of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church. . . . The Central Virginia Masterworks Chorale sings Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem and more, May 10 at Duncan Memorial United Methodist Church in Ashland and May 17 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond. . . . James Ross discusses and conducts Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony (No. 9) with the Symphony Musicians of Richmond in a benefit for the United Way, May 20 at St. Michael Catholic Church.

* Noteworthy elsewhere: Violinist Leonidas Kavakos spends two weeks at Washington’s Kennedy Center, playing Sibelius’ Violin Concerto with the National Symphony, May 7-9; joining NSO music director and pianist Christoph Eschenbach in a recital on May 11; and playing violin and conducting the NSO in a program of Bach, Sibelius and Mussorgsky, May 14-16. . . . Marin Alsop conducts the Baltimore Symphony in an all-Russian program, with Lukáš Vondrácek as soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, May 7 at Strathmore in the Maryland suburbs of DC and May 10 at the Ferguson Arts Center of Christopher Newport University in Newport News. . . . Two celebrated pianists perform on successive nights at the Kennedy Center, Igor Levit playing Bach, Beethoven and more on May 9, and Paul Lewis playing the last three sonatas of Beethoven on May 10. (Lewis’ recital is sold out, with a waiting list.) . . . Thierry Escaich plays compositions of Brahms, Bach, Vierne and Stravinsky and improvises a symphony on submitted themes, May 13 on the organ of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. . . . Baroque specialist Nicholas McGegan leads the Virginia Symphony in an all-Handel program, featuring soprano Amanda Forsythe, May 24 at the Williamsburg Lodge. . . . Opera Lafayette, the DC early music troupe, gives two performances of André Grétry’s “L’Épreuve Villageoise” (“The Village Trial”), May 30 at the Kennedy Center.

As I reassemble my home in a new location – and, between unpacking boxes, assemble the May events calendar – Mark Lederway, my fellow highbrow at WDCE, the University of Richmond radio station, has kindly consented to substitute for me this week.

Mark plans a program of music evoking nature, by Mahler, Sibelius and others. Listen for him between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. April 30 on WDCE, broadcasting at 90.1 FM, streaming online at www.wdce.org

The Richmond Symphony’s Masterworks series greets spring with two helpings of grandeur and a generous side order of brooding high-romanticism. The grandeur comes from Edward Elgar, the leading musical voice of Edwardian Britain, and – perhaps surprisingly – from Benjamin Broening, the University of Richmond music professor best-known as director of the Third Practice Electroacoustic Music Festival.

Broening’s “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” receiving its premiere in the weekend’s symphony concerts, is purely acoustic, traditionally orchestrated, couched in a modern but hardly radical idiom, attuned to the latter-day impressionism that has become widespread in contemporary American composition.

The five-movement work draws its title and much of its inspiration from a 1923 poem by Wallace Stevens evoking a sea voyage from New York to California through the Panama Canal. Broening’s music sounds less representative of the sea itself than of its energies and those of the atmosphere around it – one hears wind more than water. The piece is highly colorful, but more primary colored than the pastel hues favored by the early 20th-century impressionists.

The composer clearly knows what impressions he wishes to impart – the movement titles are strings of unambiguous adjectives – and audibly knows how to use the resources of a large orchestra to vivid effect.

Elgar showed a similar mastery in his “Enigma Variations” (1899), a set of sound portraits of 14 friends (“13 and a dog,” to be precise) that range from the monumentally declaratory to the skittishly playful to the wistfully noble (the famous “Nimrod”).

Conductor Steven Smith and the symphony reveled in both the Broening and the Elgar in the first of two weekend performances. The more dramatic the gesture or complex the interplay of voices, the better they performed.

Daisuke Yamamoto, the orchestra’s concertmaster, is the program’s featured soloist, playing the Violin Concerto in D minor of Jean Sibelius. This is one of the most elusive of virtuoso violin concertos, both because of its considerable technical challenges and because of its peculiar expressive quality, simultaneously highly romantic and emotionally reserved.

Yamamoto showed a firm grasp of the Sibelius rhetorically, especially in the concerto’s central adagio. Technically, the performance I heard displayed stretches of darkly sonorous beauty and weighty expressivity, but altogether was more effortful than fluent.

The program repeats at 3 p.m. April 19 at the Carpenter Theatre of Richmond CenterStage, Sixth and Grace streets. Tickets: $10-$78; details: (800) 514-3849 (ETIX), www.richmondsymphony.com

The “Voices of Survival” concert, presented on Jan. 27 by the Richmond Symphony and Chorus with a combined chorus from the state’s colleges and universities, will be broadcast at 9 p.m. April 15 on WCVE (Channel 23), Central Virginia’s public television station, to mark Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day).

The Greater Richmond Children’s Choir will hold auditions for its 2015-16 season on April 18 with an information session at 10:30 a.m. and on May 12 with an information session at 7 p.m., both at Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, 8 N. Laurel St.

GRCC, which is open to children 8 and older, has several choirs at different proficiency levels. No audition is required for the entry level Treble Choir. Membership in other ensembles require auditions.

To make an appointment for an audition, call (804) 201-1894.

To learn more about the Greater Richmond Children’s Choir, visit its website, www.grcchoir.org